On Some Strange Tide
by Helen1969
Summary: Space is like an ocean... and like an ocean, sooner or later, whatever you throw away into it has a way of washing back upon the shore. No matter how hard the Gaia Sanction tried they forgot this cardinal law: secrets have a way of getting out... (CGI verse, Yama-as-Harlock, set after Red Shift Blues)
1. What the driftwood bore

" _However the Gaia Coalition had done it, they'd hidden the destruction of Earth from the entire universe."_

" _The Days After" by Pollywantsa_

" _Nothing is secret which shall not be made manifest."_

 _Luke._

* * *

 _Black, blacker, blackest…_ in the darkness of the void, a ship danced in the shadows that wreathed its kilometre long form as it dodged red lances fired from the Alliance vessel dogging its heels. The billowing clouds of dark matter which surrounded the Arcadia deflected most of the rays she didn't dodge. The rest… well. They barely scored the dull leathery surface of the phantom ship, and where they did, puffs of dark matter writhed over the surface, the gashes healing almost as soon as they were formed.

Humans have a tendency to prefer to look at the world around them as though they'd never left a planetary surface to venture into the dark between the stars. So the bridge of the Alliance gunship stayed resolutely face-on to the Arcadia in the same plane. A sure-fire sign of a piss-poor rookie of a captain at the helm. Or a machinner.

It was what killed them, in the end, when the Arcadia upended and dove "down" towards their top flank. Fiery red eyes set in the grim skull that formed her prow were the last thing anyone on board would have seen.

Had they bothered to think in more than two dimensions.

The Arcadia broke the back of the other ship with contemptuous ease, the dark matter ramming blade dissolving into smoke as it passed through the wreckage.

It didn't look back. A sudden billowing gust of darkness enveloped what little could have been seen of the ship if anyone had been watching, and scattered into vapour trails as the great pirate battleship entered imaginary number space.

* * *

'Did the _Prometheus_ catch up to the transport ships?'

The speaker was a tall young man in his mid-to-late twenties, standing behind the archaic wooden ship's wheel at the front of the battle bridge gantry. His brown hair brushed the top of a high collared maroon jacket zipped up over a pale blue jersey. A white skull and crossbones was emblazoned over the left chest pocket - a symbol not short on other examples sported by the men and women around him. One hazel eye was fixed on his executive officer, the other hidden under a black leather eyepatch which in turn was partly obscured by an untidy fringe.

'One got away, but Dan's got the rest in hand. He says thank you by the way.' Arcadia's XO smiled at her captain. 'At least, I think that's what all that ranting about charging into places we weren't invited and causing a major incident translates to…'

There were laughs from the lower bridge at her comment.

Harlock smirked. 'Two word answer, Kei - just "you're welcome".'

With an answering smile, Kei leaned over her console to send the message. At the left-hand station next to the wheel, the ship's first mate, Yattaran, snorted. 'If his people would do their bloody jobs properly, we wouldn't need to get involved…'

Harlock turned his attention to the fat man. 'In his defence, they're stretched thin right now. There are far too many colonies out here vulnerable to the harvesters. These people were lucky we were close enough to hear their distress call. As it was one transport got away. That's anywhere up to five thousand people forced either into machine bodies, or stripped of their life force to feed the machines.'

Yattaran dropped his gaze, and pulled his glasses off to polish the lenses on the hem of a less-than pristine striped jersey, before pushing them back onto his nose. 'You can't save 'em all…' he muttered.

Harlock didn't reply, but turned back to the wheel and placed his hands at eleven and one, gloved hands gripping the worn balusters firmly. 'Kei - now that's taken care of - do we still have a lock on that other distress signal you picked up?'

'The one that's the reason why we're out here this far?' She called up a hologrammatic starmap of the area, that floated above the heads of the lower bridge crew. 'Still very faint, but stronger than it was - I think we've actually headed in the right direction.' A small blinking red light flickered in the map, towards an area strangely devoid of information. 'According to the charts though, there should be nothing out there - it's a dead zone, between our galaxy and the Greater Magellanic Cloud, and there are no trade routes out here - solar systems are few and far between on our side, and none of the closest have any habitable worlds so even the mining corporations haven't bothered expanding out here. Frankly, I'm not even sure what something could be doing out this far.'

Harlock studied the chart intently. 'Could be a trap…' he mused. 'But not for us… we only caught this by accident - if we hadn't swung around to deal with that Doppler Corp ship, we wouldn't have picked it up.'

Clicking heels on the metal gantry behind him signalled the arrival of the ship's resident faery-like alien chatelaine, Mimay. The tall Nibelung woman stood at Harlock's side, her long fine pale hair fluttering in the soft breeze of the ship's air flow. 'Tochiro says the signal is an old one,' she said quietly. 'It's an old Gaia Fleet distress beacon, dating back to the Homecoming War.'

'A hundred year old S.O.S.?' Yattaran shook his head. 'Gotta be all dead by now - let's just log it and blow this area.'

Harlock shook his head. 'No. The law of the sea still holds - that's not our call to make. We check it out. If it's just an old drifting wreck, then it won't take long to log it and set a buoy.'

Ali, the ship's resident devil's advocate, snorted. From his station on the lower bridge he called up: 'Is that _including_ the best part of a fortnight we'll be travelling to and from that location, cap'n?'

Harlock took his hands off the wheel and strode towards the railing at the edge of the gantry. Peering down at the blond crewman, he folded his arms casually across his chest. 'Lost your sense of adventure, Ali? Even if it turns out to be a bust, it's a chance to explore a little.'

'Huh. You just can't resist a chance to stick yer nose in, can you?' Ali muttered. He shook his head then grinned up at his captain. 'Want me to run the book on how this could go wrong this time?' he quipped.

'Suit yourself,' Harlock replied with a shrug. 'Oh ye of little faith…'

'And yet, so much _experience…'_ Ali shot back as his captain turned his back on him, to the merriment of the rest of the crew.

* * *

Harlock stared out of the bridge window, standing behind the ship's wheel, arms folded across his chest. 'There's nothing out there, Yattaran - so where's that signal coming from?'

Kei checked her console again whilst the first mate tugged his bandanna from his almost bald head and began wringing it in his hands. 'According to the sensors, we should be right on top of it - astronomically speaking…' She looked up to meet Harlock's one-eyed gaze. 'But I'm getting some weird readings from dead ahead.'

'Define weird...' her captain muttered. 'Keep on that signal - it's probably a deep space relay buoy. If it was launched during whatever happened to its ship, it might have drifted a fair way from the point of origin.'

'Ah! Got it!' Yattaran called out, pumping one meaty fist into the air. 'Maji's got a line on it. Small distress beacon, Homecoming War vintage, as expected. Very faint, so looks like it was the tail-end of the wave we were picking up.'

A short, stocky youth in that awkward stage between fifteen and twenty wandered over to take a look at the readings. An unruly mop of brown hair fell over his eyes, which he brushed away to reveal a plain but friendly face, with perhaps a few days growth of soft fuzz. 'Tail end?' he asked.

'Ah. This is what you get for skipping astrophysics in favour of biology, Tadashi.' Yattaran gave the lad a bump on the arm with a fist. 'We're travelling in Imaginary Number space, which basically means we drop out of normal space-time, so that we can violate the cosmic constants - you know, like lightspeed?'

'That sounds sooo wrong, but I'm listening,' Tadashi told him.

'So the beacon puts out a distress call on all frequencies - which to be effective includes a trip through IN-SKIP space, otherwise no-one would pick it up until the carrier wave reached an inhabited system. And since that carrier wave travels at the speed of light…'

'...it takes years or centuries to get there?' Tadashi grinned up at the big first mate. 'I did pay _some_ attention, Yattaran!'

'Yeah? See me later, there'll be a test, short stuff…' Yattaran grumped at him, with a broad grin suggesting he wasn't entirely serious. 'So we caught the carrier wave about eighty to ninety years out; it's still transmitting, but it's almost done for.'

His comms pinged on his console and he broke off to answer it. 'Yeah? Maji?' Various affirmative and interrogative grunts followed until he switched off. 'Captain - you might want to take a look at this. Maji says the only signal this thing was putting out _was_ the carrier - someone had surgically removed the warp radio before it was launched!'

* * *

In the central computer room, Harlock, Mimay and Kei stared down at the bucket-sized distress beacon. Its innards were strewn across the floor in front of the main computer - mostly to allow the Arcadia's long-dead designer to inspect the workings as Maji and Yattaran had skilfully dissected the device.

Tochiro's hologram now leaned thoughtfully over the casing, peering intently at what was left, despite, Harlock knew, the real "eyes" of the Central Computer being a series of powerful micro-cameras currently orbiting their creator.

'Well?' he asked.

All three turned to look at him, none answering straight away. Yattaran scratched his arse idly before opening his mouth. 'Whoever emasculated this distress beacon, did it before it was installed. Surgical job too - my money would be on at the factory…'

'How can you tell?' Kei leaned over the parts strewn across the floor, oblivious to the fact that her partly unzipped flightsuit left little to the imagination for anyone kneeling on the floor in front of her. Harlock, clued in by the collective sighs from his three technical experts - living and dead - gave her a tap on the arm to get her attention, and once she was standing, ostentatiously pulled the zipper up to her neck, giving an almost imperceptible jerk of his head towards the three in reply to her interrogative raised eyebrow.

'Spoilsport…' Yattaran muttered with a disapproving glance at his captain. 'To answer your question, because they're designed to be tamper-proof once installed. You just don't crack these things once in place - can't be done, for obvious reasons…'

'Begs the question why someone wanted a military ship to stay lost in the first place,' Kei muttered. She leaned against the arm Harlock had placed around her. 'I don't like the feel of this at all.'

'It's been a hundred years,' Harlock replied. He gave her a peck on the cheek. 'How much trouble could we find on a hundred-year-old battleship…' He stared at the three engineers who were all looking at him as though he'd grown two heads. 'Ah. Fine. You've got me there…'

'Do you still intend to investigate?' It was Tochiro who asked. The hologrammatic image of the Central Computer's guiding intelligence looked at once both pleading and excited at the prospect.

'How can I not, when you've got that kid-with-nose-pressed-against-the-sweetshop-window look?' Harlock replied with a grin. When the hologram gave his two partners in crime a questioning look, Maji shrugged.

'He's right, you know… you do, when you really want to see something.' the dapper engineer told him.

'I thought it was Kei's cleavage that had him wagging his tail,' Yattaran muttered.

'Mimay - anything you remember about lost ships out this way from just after the war? Tochiro?' Kei asked, scowling at the rotund first mate along the way.

Both shook their heads. 'It took Harlock a few years to recover from what happened on Earth,' Mimay replied sadly. 'And from what we had become. After that, we stole the oscillators and began the plan to unchain the nodes of time.'

'Anything in the news reports in your databases?' Harlock asked. Tochiro's ghostly image shrugged.

'Nothing. Though as Mimay says, it was a hectic time - it wasn't just Harlock who took time to adjust… took me a couple of years to integrate myself completely into the systems - before then I was winging it from second to second, didn't really have an awful lot of me-time, as it were.'

'I got an ident!' Maji called out suddenly. He looked a little abashed as all eyes turned to him, and rubbed his goatee self-consciously. 'It's from a ship called the _Mahoroba_ … she was a destroyer registered out of Earth Base, built in 2865. _Yamato_ class - the ones with the prototype oscillator cannon…'

'Well that's odd,' Tochiro muttered. When Harlock turned his singular gaze to him, he pantomimed a cough. 'Because she's noted in the Gaia Fleet register as destroyed in action in the asteroid belt just before the cease-fire…'

Kei shared a look with Harlock. 'So how the hell did her supposedly tamper-proof distress beacon end up on the other side of a galaxy a few years later?'

Harlock shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair. 'Salvage?'

Yattaran shook his head. 'Nope. These things are a one-time deployment - you can't remove them and put them on another ship - sets 'em off.'

'Yo! Heads up guys!' Ali's head appeared around the doorway, shortly followed by the rest of him. 'Got a hit on the time radar a couple of light years out. Looks like it's the time trace for this baby - and guess what?' He paused, waiting for them to ask.

Harlock folded his arms across his chest and began tapping his fingers on his arm.

'Yeah. Right. Okay. Be like that…'

'Ali…' Harlock warned him.

'Ooh. Tone. Fine. There's a mass reading at the other end of the trace. Way bigger than us, smaller than Pluto.'

'Doesn't narrow it down much,' Kei pointed out.

'Hey - that's as precise as it got - don't shoot the messenger - I was lucky to get any kind of fix - it keeps fluctuating like crazy. And get this - according to the nav charts, there isn't supposed to be anything there at all!' He folded his arms across his chest - today covered by a bright red sweater - and waited expectantly. When no reaction was forthcoming beyond blank looks, he sighed theatrically. 'You guys… call yourselves scientists?'

'I'm a botanist, Kei's a navigational mathematician, Maji and Tochiro are engineers and Yattaran's a lazy bastard,' Harlock drawled. 'Spit it out, Ali…'

'Get out of the wrong side of bed this morning, Cap'n?'

Harlock took a step towards him.

'Fine, fine… Sheesh, you guys are a tough crowd… I said "mass", right? _Just_ mass…'

Mimay cocked her head to one side and stared at him, her large, cat-like eyes wide and curious. 'No other signals?' she asked.

Ali jabbed a finger at her. 'Bingo! The lovely alien gets it! No energy readings at all. No gravity distortion, no light, no radiation - nada, zip, zero, nothing… except...'

'Except?' Kei prompted, a little testily.

Ali grinned. 'You'll love this one - so how the hell is the verbal S.O.S signal I'm hearing on Kei's console reaching us…?'


	2. Some wrecked ship

_... EDF … Maho...ba. Repeat: … lost… power... Navigation… negative… save… ...peat, this is….ba….stay...ger..._

'I can't clean it up any further.' Kei pulled a face, hating to be beaten by a mere signal.

'It's decayed too much over the last hundred years,' Yattaran added. 'This is as good as it gets.'

They were back on the bridge, staring at the section of space the signal had originated. Even at maximum magnification, they could see nothing on the screen. Harlock leaned on the wheel, toying idly with one of the dark wooden balusters.

'It sounds more like a warning than a request for help,' he muttered. He grimaced. 'Haven't we seen this warp-vid?'

'What happened to the Duty of the Sea?' Ali asked facetiously. Yattaran mimed clipping him upsides the back of the head.

Harlock straightened and took a firm hold of the ship's wheel. From its perch on the back of the skull and bones decorated captain's chair, the captain's black bird launched itself into lumbering flight, to land on Harlock's right shoulder and start preening. 'We go in, but slowly. First sign of trouble, we get the hell out. No heroics - if it's a derelict, we move on and leave a warning marker. Anything that's a shipping hazard we blow to bits.'

Yattaran leaned over the balcony. 'Okay, you lazy bastards - you heard the captain! Jump to it!'

Kei sauntered over to him and tapped him on the shoulder. 'Seriously, First mate? Didn't we put a stop to all that macho bullshit?'

A ripple of laughter from the lower bridge elicited a sly smile from Harlock, and she smiled at him as she turned back to her station.

'This isn't battlestations, Yattaran,' Harlock said quietly as Yattaran took his station. 'I don't need impressing.'

'It's traditional…' The fat man scratched his stomach absently. 'You're just no fun somedays, captain.'

'No, but I like a nice, quiet, competent crew who can get their jobs done without being yelled at. When _I_ start bellowing orders, _then_ you can make them hop to it…'

Kei took up the slack. 'All ahead slow. All eyes on sensors. Ali, Levary - gun crews ready. First person to spot anything can have a coffee from the captain's private supply instead of Yattaran's brew!'

Laughter all round followed, especially at the captain's pained 'Hey!', although only Kei saw the wink that accompanied it.

* * *

Surrounded by wisps of dark matter, the Arcadia glided forwards, the ruby-red eyes of the skull on her prow staring into the void.

Carlos first called out a verifiable signal, as the Arcadia inched her way along the trajectory determined by the time radar trace. 'Captain - ten degrees off the starboard bow, fifteen degree elevation! I've got a mass reading!'

'Yattaran?' Harlock brought the ship about on the new heading with a delicate flick of his left hand.

Yattaran hitched up his pants and peered at his console. 'On the nose, captain. Getting stronger, but still no visual, or any other confirmation…'

Kei looked up from her own station. 'I'm getting some odd gravitational fluctuations around us though… the navigational references are going haywire!'

'I see something!' an excited call from below, from the dark-haired youth, Tadashi, who'd been helping the cook, Anita, hand out elevenses to the crew on duty. The dishes and mugs on the tray he carried wobbled alarmingly as he forgot he had his hands full and tried to point at the main viewer. 'There's a gash, right in front of us!'

Sure enough, the screen began to fill with a long, reddish gash in the void. Seemingly narrow at first, soon it filled the screen from top to bottom. Faint shapes began to appear inside it; like flickering shadows in firelight cast upon a wall.

'I don't like the look of this…' Yattaran muttered.

'My readings are getting stranger,' Kei added. She shot a questioning look at Harlock, who still stood firm behind the wheel.

'Those are ships,' he replied softly. 'Look.'

'More than one,' Ali called up from the lower deck. ' _Now_ I'm getting distinct readings - you won't believe the read-outs on this thing!'

'Well we're going in, so just keep me posted,' his captain told him. 'All hands on alert, and steady as she goes…'

The Arcadia entered the rift.

* * *

The first thing they noticed was the light. Where space was an intense darkness, unless in-system or they used the real-time modulation on the screen to render the sensor readings into a recognisable visual, they were now surrounded by a pale red-orange glow which had no discernible source. The light came from everywhere and nowhere.

It allowed them to see the dozens - if not hundreds - of ships which lay in front of them. Lit by the flickering aurora of reds, oranges and yellows which ebbed and flowed over the scene, they were scattered over an area of about one standard AU.

Yattaran sighed almost happily as he stared at the main screen, Maji at his side looking equally entranced.

'Would you look at that?' he breathed. He pointed to a sleek, slender profiled vessel with a rectangular spinal mount cannon protruding from her bow. Even with part of her stern missing and her flank shredded, she lay gracefully amidst the debris of lesser vessels. 'Andromeda class battleship - they only built two. They were both supposed to have gone down with all hands after the battle of Neptune. And there's an old Cosmo Tiger!'

'That's the Karyu I!' Maji pointed to a similar but smaller ship. 'She's tiny - she always looked bigger in the vids!'

Ali, standing between Harlock and Kei, folded his arms across his red sweater and glared over at the two. 'Seriously - you two propeller heads are gushing over this shit like schoolboys. It's a little bit disturbing, given how many ships are here.'

'And all dead in the water,' Kei said sadly. 'No lifesigns at all so far.'

'They're not all military,' Maji said quietly, more soberly this time. 'I can see several civilian ships there as well - mostly in pieces. They're not transports though - I recognise the crane of an old construction rig, and a couple of the larger bits on the port side look like cargo transports.'

'They ain't all old, either.' Ali strolled over to Yattaran's station and casually elbowed the fat man out of the way, ignoring the elbow he got back in his own ribs by return. He brought up a magnified image on the tactical screen, and zoomed in. 'Zone Industries cargo carrier, came out about twenty years ago. Next to that, a Doppler Corporation mining transport - the hull markings show she's registered out of Shaitan, and he only moved there five years ago.'

'Less damage to those two, I notice.' Harlock pointed at the screen. 'I can see impact damage - perhaps from the debris field - but no weapon damage this side at least. Can we swing round into the graveyard and take a closer look?'

'That's a lot of debris…' Kei replied. She frowned. 'Even with shields up and self-repair, ploughing through that isn't without risk…'

'Harlock…' Mimay stepped forwards out of the shadows behind the command chair. 'There is a small but perceptible drain on the dark matter drive even here. Going deeper into this field might not be a good idea…'

'We take a Bullet in then.' He stared at the screen intently, then pointed. 'There's our point of origin - towards the centre of this graveyard. _Mahoroba_ …'

She was a big ship, but slightly smaller than Arcadia. Similar in design to the former Deathshadow class Arcadia had once been.

'She's still a little beauty,' came a voice over the comms system. Slightly mechanical in tone, but it was a smooth, pleasant and resonant voice despite the synthesiser.

And the fact that its owner had been dead for a hundred years.

'I designed her - back when I still worked directly for the Fleet Engineering arm,' Tochiro continued. 'During what Harlock liked to call my "minimalist" phase…'

The namesake of the Central computer's old friend stared again at the screen, as Ali, without prompting, magnified the image to centre on the old battleship.

Or what was left of her. In places, the hull was completely stripped away to reveal the superstructure. Her engines were gone, leaving only gaping wounds in her stern, and her weapons mounts were similar open sores on what was left of her hull. But enough remained to showcase the sweeping curves of her lines - so much more graceful than the blocky Andromeda class ship riding off their bow.

'My poor girl…' Tochiro whispered. 'She was a sister-ship to our old Yukikaze, did you know that? I always thought the records were right, that she'd fallen in battle - I never dreamed she'd end up in a place like this… look what they've done to her…'

'She's been surgically stripped,' Ali pointed out. 'Doesn't take much of an eye to see that - see the cut marks on her hull? That's not blast damage - and around her drives… even at this distance you can see whoever stripped her knew what they were doing…'

'And it happened here,' Kei added. 'That signal originated from this part of space. She was still manned when she got here.' She scanned her console again. 'And I hate to worry you, but I don't like the way my readings are fluctuating. I can't find anything obvious to account for it, but it's as though space isn't entirely stable in this neck of the woods… both the background microwave radiation and gravity readings are changing every time I look at them.'

Yattaran hitched up his pants again and wandered over to take a look.

'Get a new belt…' Kei muttered as he elbowed her off her post. ' _Please…'_

'Eh, it's miniscule,' he replied, ignoring her comment, and giving Ali a stink-eye when the blond pirate sniggered. 'Could just be interference on the sensors.'

'I'd rather not take that chance,' Harlock told him firmly. 'But I still need to take a closer look. Kei - take command. Yattaran, helm. Carlos, Yasu, up here. Levary, Bob - gun crews. I'll take Tadashi, Ali, Doc, Anita, Sabu and Maji.'

Kei nodded at the choice - muscle, engineering, and medical. Even so, she stopped him before he left the bridge. 'Take the cloak. Just in case?' She lifted the heavy gravity cloak from its resting place over the back of the captain's chair and handed it to him - not without a struggle, as the red lined cloak weighed several kilos without its power on. 'I prefer to know that you have a little protection against stray shots.'

'I don't,' Ali grumped at her as he helped Harlock swing it onto his shoulders and attach it to the built-in points on his flight suit. 'Those shots have to go _somewhere_ when this thing does its trick with the whole bendy-gravity-thing.' He glared at his captain. 'I couldn't sit down for a bloody week after that last time…' They both made for the stairs, Tadashi in tow.

Harlock snorted. 'Oh, get over it already. That was six months ago, and it was barely a scratch. And if you'd done what you were told and stayed back to cover me, you wouldn't have been in a position to be shot in the arse in the first place…'

Beside them, Tadashi sniggered and grinned at Ali. 'Really? That one never made the rounds…'

'Nor was it ever going to,' Ali retorted with a sharp look at his now innocently smiling captain. 'Since it was just me and Captain fancy-pants here, and he knows the penalty for blabbing…'

They were heading down the corridor by now, Tadashi having to almost skip to keep up with the older, taller men. Harlock ignored Ali, who winked at Tadashi. 'Two words, Captain - Grand. Technologia.'

'Is that the best you've got? Got me a week of pity-sex from Kei to make up for being forced to pretend to be your cheap man-whore in an alleyway that stank like a cess-pit after a heatwave. I had to burn that jacket - couldn't get the smell or the stains out… I have no secrets from Kei, and I'm not so insecure I need to assert my testosterone levels by denying it, so I can only assume the reason you kept it quiet was that _you're_ in denial...'

Tadashi choked and stared at the two mens' backs as they sauntered ahead of him, bickering. 'Seriously?' he muttered.

If they heard him, they ignored him.

'Really? Did you tell her you had your hands all over my ass? Coz you're _grabby…'_ Ali shot back.

Harlock shrugged. 'You weren't complaining at the time…'

'You had your _tongue_ down my bloody throat at the time - it probably came out as "mmph mmph mmph"…'

Harlock shrugged again. 'You said "sell it" to the bounty-hunters following us. I used to be in Covert Ops, Ali, did you forget? The only reason my brother didn't pimp me out to a few high-ranking Gaia Coalition officials was that Martians are a little - shall we say - _backward_ about same-sex relationships. He sure as hell had no scruples about throwing me to the cougars at any official function if he thought I could gain him an edge…'

'Can we go back in time and shoot the bastard all over again? Your brother was an even bigger waste of oxygen than I thought,' Ali replied plaintively.

Harlock reached out and ruffled Ali's hair, to a "gerroff!". Tadashi smiled at the exchange, and kept a discreet distance.

'And that's why I love you, you big oaf…' From his angle, Tadashi could just make out the edge of Harlock's quirky little grin.

Ali brushed the offending hand away. 'Stop that, not in front of the little 'uns. They'll get the wrong idea…'

Tadashi jumped in at that point - he just couldn't help himself. 'S'all right, Ali. I had the _Talk_ \- you know, about pirates, and how young men need to stay safe…' When Ali stopped in his tracks to look over his shoulder, he fluttered his eyelashes.

Harlock laughed out loud at that, and Ali glared at Tadashi. 'You little…' he turned his glare on Harlock and jabbed a finger at him. 'And you - you… see what you've started!'

They were still bickering good-naturedly when they arrived at the hangar, Tadashi almost pulling a muscle in an attempt to stop from laughing. Days like these, despite the potential danger, he liked.

 _Family_ … Albeit an extended, somewhat dysfunctional one, he thought, as Ali switched to teasing Sabu, the big guy not really up to keeping track of the repartee. Anita and Doc both took him to task about it, and Ali took their scolding in good part, earning a clip to the back of the head from the brawny cook, and eye-rolling from the slim, pony-tailed doctor.

Tadashi caught Harlock's eye from the cockpit and scooted forward to take the co-pilot seat, shooting a cheeky grin back over his shoulder at Ali, who would usually have called shotgun.

'If you're that keen on taking point, take us out, Tadashi,' Harlock said quietly. He swept the cloak out of his way with a graceful move, and sat down.

'Really?' The youth almost bounced in his seat, but managed to keep his enthusiasm in check and begin the pre-flight routine. In his enthusiasm he made a couple of errors, quickly picked up by his captain, and then they were heading out of the hangar, towards the centre of the graveyard of ships.


	3. The sea just sits silently

On the bridge of the Arcadia, Kei stood to one side of the ship's wheel, hands on her hips, watching the Bullet proceed into the graveyard and debris and nibbling her bottom lip nervously. Mimay glided to her side and laid a hand on her shoulder.

'I still have a nasty feeling about this place,' Kei told the alien beauty. Mimay tilted her head to one side slightly, and her tiny mouth twitched into a reassuring smile - or as reassuring as her smooth features could be.

'I would like to tell you this is just a junkyard, but there are ships here I remember from the War,' she said softly. The fireflies which sparkled around her were more agitated than usual. 'I asked our friend to check the records - some of these ships were listed as lost with all hands during the war - completely destroyed. For them to end up out here… it makes no sense.'

'The records only date back to about ninety to ninety-five years ago as well,' Yattaran said gruffly. Standing firm behind the wheel, he too stared grimly at the main screen. 'Now you could argue they took a while to update their records after the war…'

'But why bother?' Harlock asked over the comms. 'Was someone in records really so anal they made an effort to log the fates of several warships? Seems they'd have had other priorities…'

'Then there's the civilian ships,' Yattaran added. 'A lot of heavy moving gear and cargo space in these wrecks… Oi! Whoever's on sensors, pan to starboard!'

The camera view in one corner of the tactical display moved dutifully to stare at two battered freighters and a badly-bent lifting arm. Yattaran jabbed a finger at the screen. 'Orbital loaders… vintage. Knew I recognised that crane-arm earlier. These are the kind of ships used for short-haul transport and orbital insertion of satellites for comms and early warning systems.' he paused dramatically, 'Around the time of the Homecoming War.'

* * *

On board Bullet One, Harlock swore under his breath, and leaned over to give Tadashi's hand on the controls a little push to move them out of the path of a chunk of spaceship.

'I'm not sure I like where this is going…' he muttered.

'Captain?' Tadashi risked a quick glance at Harlock.

'Eyes on the road, Tadashi.' Harlock chided him gently. He leaned back in his seat, eyes on the screen in front of him, staring at the wreckage as they moved slowly through the drifting debris. Footsteps on the metal floor clanged behind him, and he felt hands on the back of the seat, and Ali leaned over his shoulder to stare with him.

'You know where this is going, right?' Ali murmured next to his left ear.

'I've got a pretty good idea, and I really don't like what I'm thinking…' Harlock replied just as softly. He shot a glance back over his shoulder to where the rest of his small team were sitting - Sabu, as usual nervous but oblivious; Doc and Anita both meeting his gaze with similarly concerned looks.

He envied the big bruiser his innocence, all of a sudden. 'After we exposed the Gaia Sanction's lies - what was it - six? seven? years ago now? Kei and I asked Mimay and Tochiro how the hell the government could have kept it a secret for so long. Even they didn't know, and apparently Harlock gave it a brief thought and moved on, so no change there…'

Ali wafted the back of his captain's head, ruffling his light brown hair. 'Oi! Show a little respect!'

'Pot and kettle… besides - what are you going to do...leave a note under the sherry glass tattling on me this year?' Harlock snarked back. Rather more seriously he continued: 'There had to have been ships which survived the war and saw what Harlock did… and those hologramme satellites didn't put themselves into orbit…'

'Captain? Ali?' Tadashi's voice, still with a tendency to waver over the octaves, got their attention.

'What is it, short stuff?' Ali asked fondly. Harlock smiled to himself. The guy had a brusque manner and could best be described as having a personality like sand in your boxers on a good day, but to Tadashi and the other kids they'd taken in a couple of years ago after finding them in a cargo container full of bodies, he was a fond if gruff father figure/big brother.

'Is that what you think this is? A dumping ground for ships left over from the war? But why would hiding the ships…' Tadashi gulped, and looked a little green. 'Oh. It wouldn't be just the ships, would it?' he asked in a small voice.

'If you want to stay on board, Tadashi, you can. No-one will judge you,' Harlock told him gently. The boy shook his head firmly and took a stronger grip on the controls.

'I would,' he replied.

They were approaching the hulk of the Mahoroba now, and he yielded the controls to Harlock's more experienced hands to guide them to a docking collar. They found one still useable on the port side of the ship, and the connection was announced with a resounding clang.

'Let's hear it for our maintenance crew,' Ali quipped, moving back into the body of the small ship. He patted Maji on the back. 'Proudly keeping antiques flying since 2877… Always a pain when the tech isn't compatible.'

'Not really,' Maji replied. He pointed at a large box stowed in a corner behind webbing. 'I always bring the tools to get us into business. There isn't a docking collar yet I can't get a seal with.'

Tadashi had removed his safety belt and was approaching the hardsuit bay nervously, his hand on the butt on his holstered pistol. He wiped his gloved hands down the outside of his pants leg and then fiddled with his skull-marked belt buckle.

'You sure you'll be okay, Tadashi?' Ali asked again. 'Don't want you having nightmares and flashbacks if we come across bodies in there, kiddo, so there's no shame in sitting this out.'

Tadashi flashed him a false but cheery grin. 'I want to be a doctor like Doc here one day, Ali. To help people. Can't do that if I'm scared of finding bodies.' But he still looked a little pale.

Harlock placed a hand on his shoulder. 'You're with me, Tadashi. Ali - you too. We'll take the bridge. Maji, Sabu - engineering; Anita - Luna - you see if you can work your way through the crew quarters and the infirmary. Comms on at all times, fall back to the Bullet if anything hinky happens. No heroics.'

'Yeah…' Ali smirked. 'That's the prerogative of the guy in the fancy cloak…'

Tadashi flashed him a guileless smile. 'You mean the guy with the name people run away from really fast?' he asked innocently. 'The one that isn't "Space Pirate Captain Ali?"'

'Cheeky sod. And that joke was old before you were even an itch in yer daddy's jockstrap…'

'So were you, Ali,' Luna sauntered over and patted him on the cheek as he spluttered. 'Now quit screwing around and watch the captain's back like a good boy…'

'His back or his ass?' Tadashi smirked, and ducked a clip to the top of his head from the affronted pirate, as he struggled into his suit.

With a sigh, Harlock pushed the pair in front of him, tugging on his gauntlets. 'Play nice, children. Or I'll need to start rethinking my recruitment policy… I imagine Hunter doesn't have this problem with his crew…'

Ali fell in beside Harlock as they left the Bullet. 'That'd be because he _shoots_ anyone who pisses _him_ off…' he trailed off as he caught Harlock's sideways glare. 'Yeah. Tadashi? We'll take point…'

'You'll both stay close, is what you'll do,' Harlock told him. 'No running off on your own. Now who has the schematic Tochiro uploaded for us?'

Tadashi waved his tablet at him. Harlock smiled. 'In that case, give us a heading, Tadashi.'

'Aye aye sir!' Tadashi studied the small screen then pointed. 'This passageway leads to an access-way to the bridge according to this - so long as it isn't open to space…'

'Don't worry - we picked his section because it isn't - but we'll be safe enough in the suits if we hit a bad spot.' Harlock slid his helmet into place on his silvered Nibelung armour, and the other two followed suit. 'Remember - check in every fifteen minutes, and back to the Bullet in ninety minutes.'

With that, he set off.

* * *

Back on the Arcadia, Kei paced up and down the upper gantry, staring constantly at the main screen, where the Mahoroba floated in front of them. 'I really can't shake the feeling there's something wrong with this place,' she muttered. She stopped next to Mimay and pointed at the screen. 'For a start, the sensors are recording nothing but the mass - and even that's sporadic. So where's the light coming from? The diagnostics say there's nothing wrong with our sensors, but our eyes are telling us something completely different…'

'Are they?' Mimay asked in her soft voice. Fireflies drifted through her long flowing hair and nested in Kei's golden locks. 'What we as living beings can perceive and what a machine can are two entirely different things.'

'Yeah - machines are more precise,' Yattaran pointed out. He stepped away from his console, cursing. 'Or they should be…'

'Precision isn't everything,' Mimay continued. 'When you focus too much on the details, you lose sight of the whole. Space and time are one, and fluid. But far from solid. Yet we perceive this solidity as a fact, when it is nothing of the kind at the quantum level. Each of us is a universe unto itself, each tiny part resonating with the song of creation.' She stepped forwards, and stared at the screen across the expanse of the Arcadia's upper deck, over the forward cannon array.

'Poetic, but not a lot of help,' Yattaran muttered. Kei shushed him with a shake of her head.

'Mimay - what do you see out there,' she asked.

'There is no song,' Mimay said softly. 'Not here. Here, there is only silence, except for what we brought with us. If you could see with my eyes, hear with my voice, you would understand. There is a cacophony, but it does not _belong_ here… underneath that, there is only silence.' She shivered, her head tilted to one side as though listening to something the rest of them could not hear.

'Still not a lot of help,' Yattaran muttered. Kei gave him a push towards his console.

'Maybe. Maybe not… I think I understand what she might be trying to explain to us.'

'You speak obtuse alien now?' Yattaran snorted.

'No - but I do know when someone's trying to tell me something in a language that doesn't have the right words for the concepts she's trying to explain…' Kei jabbed a finger at Yattaran's console. '"Music of creation"? "Resonation"? She's talking about superstrings. Which means this place isn't part of "our" universe. So - what does that big brain of yours know about negative space?'

He stared at her through his thick glasses as though she'd grown a second head. 'It's a myth, for a start. A theoretical construct created by idiots in nice, tenured, comfy academic astrophysics departments to fill in the holes in their theories so they can peddle their books to unwitting morons on the lecture circuit.'

'Ooh,' Carlos called out from Kei's station. 'Erm - Kei - could you not set him off on the evils of the academic lifestyle, please? You know he has issues…'

Kei waved him off. 'Apart from that, First Mate. Dark Matter was a theoretical bandage as well, once upon a time, and yet here we are. So work with what we have - we had an intermittent signal until we came through that "hole" - and once through it, we're inside something. So - a pocket of some kind?'

'It might explain the readings outside, but not inside,' Yattaran replied. But he stroked his chin. 'But… if the rules here are slightly different…'

'Our sensors are too precise - they can pick up signals we've asked them for, but something not on the normal part of the spectrum…'

'Eh. You might have something there - but how can we calibrate for what we don't know?'

'We don't… Mimay - this ship was designed and built with Nibelung technology - was there anything in that specification which might help us? If it was back-engineered from something built with Nibelung sensors in mind, maybe something in the electronics suite might still be…'

'Possibly.' Mimay laid a hand on the wheel and the background heartbeat of the Arcadia strengthened momentarily. 'It wasn't my area of expertise - that was the Dark Matter Engines. Gullveig was the one who assisted with the sensor arrays.'

'I have the file, now I know what I'm looking for.' Tochiro's voice over the comms was as chirpy as usual. 'Good thinking. It'll take a while to reconfigure though, so in the meantime I suggest you put as many hands as you can spare onto watching through the windows. Avoid the electronic displays.'

'Isn't that just a camera screen?' Yasu pointed at the main viewer which dominated the front of the bridge.

Yattaran strolled over and patted the big, bald and not-the-sharpest-tool pirate on the back. 'Yep, that _is_ a big window. Despite what they taught you in the Fleet, it _is_ possible to make one that big on a spaceship when you have alien, self-repairing tech to hand…'

He left the big guy staring in awe at the screen and rolled his eyes as he wandered back past Kei. 'He's been on board how long?' he muttered out of the side of his mouth as he passed her.

'Play nice,' she chided. 'We don't keep everyone around purely for their brains…' She paused and looked him up and down, giving him a disdainful sniff. 'Or their sartorial charms…' She moved to stand next to Mimay, who still regarded the main screen with large, pale eyes which flickered occasionally as her third eyelids passed across them - one of the few outward signs she ever showed of any agitation. 'You should stand by ready to get us out of here. I'm especially nervous about the rift we passed through - that fluctuating signal might be down to changes in that opening.'

'We'll be ready,' Mimay promised. 'Should we inform Harlock…?'

Kei nodded. 'I'll call in privately. I don't want the crew to panic.' She gave the Nibelung a reassuring smile and clicked her way down the stairs to the communications suite under the bridge.

* * *

'Uh-huh. Got it. We won't hang about. I really think we need to know what happened here, if only to see if anything lured these newer ships out here. If there is a hazard, it needs a marker. Yeah. No - don't worry, we'll head back as soon as we finish up.' Harlock cut the comms link with a isgh.

'Kei?' Ali asked. Harlock nodded.

'We're in some weird spatial pocket that doesn't seem to totally obey normal rules - suggests we hurry along.'

'Are you translating? Coz she's not normally _that_ polite...'

'She might have mentioned donkeys needing to be moved, yes…' Harlock quipped back. 'Tadashi - where are you going?' Their youngest crewman was vanishing around a corner.

'It isn't far now,' Tadashi called out. 'But we've got some climbing to do…' The other two men looked in the direction he indicated. Ali swore under his breath.

'Bloody hell - someone built a barricade.'

The corridor ahead of them had been blocked with what looked like a hastily assembled barrier composed of metal struts and parts of the bulkheads cut off and bent into shape. However there were gaps in it, and Tadashi was kneeling in front of one of them, shining a torch through.

'It looks clear beyond here!' he shouted.

Ali took a closer look at the walls, floor and ceiling, and pointed. 'There was a firefight here… check out those blast marks…'

Harlock took a deep breath. 'I noticed. But no bodies…'

'Maybe the winners ate the losers…'

Harlock shot the burly pirate a stern look that was lost behind his faceplate. 'Not funny, Ali. Especially not in front of Tadashi.'

'I wasn't trying to be funny, for once. Wouldn't be the first time it's happened out in the wilds… the unspoken Custom of the Sea…' Ali replied seriously, over a private channel. 'Maybe we should send the kid back to the Bullet to wait?'

The sound of metal on metal, shifting and grinding, distracted both of them, and they turned in time to see Tadashi's armoured legs vanishing behind the barricade through one of the holes.

'A little late for that… Damn it!' Harlock sprinted over to the barricade and knelt down to the level of the hole Tadashi had wriggled through. 'Tadashi! What did I say about no heroics?'

'It's okay, captain! I knew I could get through, thought I'd give it a try… the bridge is just up ahead, I thought I could…'

All Harlock could see through the darkness was the faint circular light the beams cast on the corridor ahead of the boy, his silhouette in the centre. It swept to one side, and then there was only darkness. The torch hit the floor with a clatter, and both men winced as a high pitched boyish treble screamed over their comms.


	4. But sometimes she does more…

'Tadashi! Tadashi!' Harlock stuck his head through the hole in the barricade, trying to see through the gloom. 'Shit. Ali - can we cut this a little bigger?'

'Not quickly.' he helped his captain wriggle back out of the opening by means of grabbing his ankles and hauling him backwards. 'But I think I can pull a couple of bits loose to let us through - thankfully we're both in the fit-hunks armour, not the fat-bastard versions…'

'You do know you're on speaker?' Anita's voice over the link almost dripped acid into Ali's left ear, and he flinched.

'Deal with him later, Anita - Ali -show me. Tadashi - hang on in there, we're coming!' Under Ali's guidance They quickly pulled away some of the rebar to enlarge a hole. Over the comms, Tadashi's initial scream had subsided to heavy, fast breathing. 'Big enough?' Harlock whispered to Ali. 'He's hyperventilating - not good on a limited air supply…'

'If I hold it for you, you should be able to slip through - you're skinnier than I am. Go on - less chat. Go get him!'

Harlock unholstered his cosmo dragoon, unfastened the gravity cloak to let it drop to the floor, and knelt again, this time carefully feeling his way through the barricade, and trying not to imagine a ton of rebar landing on his head.

 _Tadashi's not the only one with nasty flashbacks_ … He'd been pinned more than once under collapsing girders, and it never got any easier. He wriggled free of the barricade with a large sigh of relief, and straightened up. Pistol in one hand, torch in the other, he made his way carefully towards where Tadashi's torch rolled on the floor, casting a weak beam of light.

Something crunched underneath a metal boot, and he swung the torch down to look.

A rib cage. Human. He lifted his foot to place it somewhere less disturbing, and paused with it still in mid stride.

The floor was littered with bones. All of them human. He shivered, but hunkered down for a closer look: a pile of skulls, none of them intact. Another of long bones, all of them split ... _to get at the marrow_ …? The magnification on his viewscreen kicked in on command, zooming in on the unmistakeable kerf marks on the bones.

He swallowed the bile that rose into his throat. _Crap_ …

'Harlock?' Ali's voice broke into his attempts to avoid throwing up in his armour.

'Here. You were right… I've got a midden back here. Bones.'

'I'd rather have been wrong. Any sign of your cabin boy?'

'I'm not his ca..cabin boy, Ali!' Tadashi's voice over the link was unsteady, but indignant. 'I..I...I'm on the bridge. I th...think the captain needs to see this…'

'I'm on my way, Tadashi.' Carefully picking his way through the bone-covered floor - how many? He made his way towards the light of Tadashi's torch, a few yards ahead and picked it up.

The boy was standing in the doorway - stuck half-open - to the ship's bridge, his back pressed hard against the left hand door, and he was pinned by the body that had fallen against him when he'd tried to walk through the gap.

Harlock pulled the corpse away from the boy, wincing when the arm he tugged on pulled away from the shoulder with a splintering sensation. 'To hell with subtlety,' he muttered. He stuck his torches back in the loop on his armour's utility belt, and grabbed the desiccated thing with both hands.

Tadashi whimpered as the head fell off, bouncing off his helmet, and Harlock pushed the rest of the ragged corpse to one side. 'Hey… breathe easy, Tadashi. Nice and slow. You've practiced this…'

He kept one hand on the boy's shoulder, waiting patiently for him to get his breathing back under control. Eventually, the ragged breaths became a little calmer.

'I'm sorry,' he whispered eventually. 'When it landed on me…'

'S'okay,' his captain told him. 'I had a moment of my own under those girders. Trust me, sometimes, it's hard to shake a bad memory… I'd be more worried if you didn't wobble when reminded of that damn container..'

...the memory of those young children stuffed into a cargo container still haunted _him_ … and he'd only opened it. Tadashi… he'd spent two weeks in there watching them die, unable to do anything to stop it.

The crisis past, he freed his torch again, and handed the other back to Tadashi. With a shuddering breath, Tadashi plucked up the courage to take another look, and pointed his torch into the room. Harlock added his own light to the beam, quickly scanning the place.

Smaller than the Arcadia's bridge - and far more cramped. The Arcadia sported a bridge that had a somewhat - _retro -_ feel - her extremely hi-tech equipment masqueraded as a kind of steam-punk aesthetic - glowing gauges, dials, a captain's chair made of bones and skulls, a wheel more at home on an ancient sailing vessel, and the pulleys which lined the walls - all contained in a gothic folly that arced above her crew like the vault of an ancient cathedral.

By comparison he'd always found other battleships a little… drab. Clinical and technological, rather than… say… a little magical. Even here, with the only light coming from their two torches, there was no magic in this place, on this ship. It was lines, and curves of mathematical precision…

...and horror. His torch swept over the corpses seated at their stations - tattered clothing still covering bone wrapped in desiccated tissue, drawn tight like shrivelled parchment. Others lay on the floor, most of them with their skulls pointing towards the door, arms outstretched as though they'd been running for the door when…

...when someone had shot them in the back of the head. Each skull - most still with parchment and a few strands of hair attached, had a blaster wound in the back of it.

In the captain's chair, another skeletal corpse, its peaked cap resting in its lap, a blaster bolt wound in the side of its head this time - and the gun still in the hand that had fallen to the side, the muzzle resting on the floor.

'Captain…?'

Harlock placed an arm around the youth's shoulders, even though in armour it was a fairly useless gesture. Tadashi gulped back a sob and wrapped his arms around his captain. Despite a recent growth spurt he still only came up to Harlock's chin. 'Easy, easy… ' Even through the armour he could feel the boy trembling. 'Whatever happened here, it was a long time ago.' Eventually he was able to get himself unwrapped, and push the boy away. Useless to look at his face, obscured as it was by the opaque (from the outside) faceplate. Still, he could place his hands on the lad's shoulders and straighten him up a little. 'Are you going to be okay?'

Tadashi nodded. 'I...I think so. Yes. Sorry, captain…'

'For running on ahead against orders? We'll discuss that later. I know how hard this must be…'

'I can deal, sir.' That brassy helmet lifted up in a defiant gesture as old as puberty. 'Really. What do you think happened?'

'It looks as though he killed the crew, then himself. Some waited for the blow… others chose to run, to live.' He released Tadashi and took a step into the room. 'I need to see if they left the log. You can wait here, or go back to wait with Ali.'

'I'll stay, captain.'

Harlock nodded. 'Good man. Anita - anything from your end?'

'Stores have been totally depleted - and it looks as though someone raided and cannibalised the ship at some point after the crew died - the armoury was stripped for a start.'

'Nita - Could you pick a different word, _please_? That's a ditto in Medical,' Luna answered without prompting. 'A handful of bodies in here, and you really don't want to know what state they're in. But the pharmacy and med stores are cleaned out - aggressively by the look of it - whoever did it just took a cutter to the doors.'

'Similar story in Engineering,' Maji chimed in. 'Except for the bodies - I've only got two, both with head wounds.'

Harlock grunted a non-committal acknowledgement and leaned over the captain to get a closer look at his desk. It didn't take long to locate the storage box for the ship's logs, and he quickly disconnected it and tucked it under one arm.

He sent Tadashi through the barricade first, then accepted Ali's helping hand out the other side, standing up with an undisguised sigh of relief.

'I take it you didn't see anything pleasant back there,' Ali asked. He handed Harlock the gravity cloak, but instead of putting it back on, Harlock placed it over his arm.

'Looks like the officers might have turned on the other crew, then just one day decided enough was enough… it doesn't take a forensic expert to guess that the captain killed the bridge crew - though some tried to escape - and then turned his pistol on himself.

'Son of a…' Ali breathed. 'Was there really no way out of this place?'

They'd been walking back to the Bullet, and as he spoke, Maji appeared out of one of the side corridors, Sabu in tow. 'Not with the drives and power cells in the state they were in. They had enough juice to keep life support running for a few months, but nothing more, and even then, only for part of the ship, and for only a handful of the crew.' He sounded a little sick, so Ali prodded him.

'And?'

'And we found a freezer,' Sabu answered for him. 'They'd turned the coolant storage into a freezer.' The big pirate sounded as though he wanted to throw up in his helmet.

They walked the rest of the way back to Bullet One in silence.

* * *

'Trust me, I'd rather not describe what I saw in the infirmary.' Luna took the bottle Mimay had placed next to her and poured about a third of it into the tumbler in front of her. With a defiant glare at the assembled crew in the war room she took a long glug before putting it down and patting her lap for the little tortoiseshell cat to leap into.

Anita was fussing over Tadashi, making sure he had a hot cocoa and a plate of biscuits in front of him. 'I'm fine,' he told her, but he still looked a little pale. 'And I want to stay…' he gave Harlock and Kei a pleading look, but both were resolute.

'Absolutely not,' Kei said firmly. 'No-one wants you having nightmares, kiddo. So you're going with Anita, and you'll sleep in Zack's old bed.'

Grumbling and protesting, he was ushered out. Once he was gone Kei breathed a sigh of relief. 'I'm dreading the boys getting to that age… they think they're so tough, so close to manhood…'

'...yet still boys, but they can't stand you trying to protect 'em…' Ali drawled. He reached for the cocoa and cookies the boy had left behind. 'Makes me glad I haven't got kids. Way too much effort - I've no idea how the hell you do it.'

'We're _all_ glad _you_ ain't reproduced, Professor,' Yattaran snarked.

'That he knows of,' Harlock added blithely. 'And the answer is "we wing it". Same as everyone else who goes through it. Now - Maji - do you have that log for me?'

The dark head of the engineer appeared from under the console which doubled as a desk in the room, almost bouncing off the underside as he backed out and stood up a little quickly. 'All done.' He tapped Yattaran on the arm to get his attention and shooed the fat man out of the way. 'Just need to sort out the audio…' he reached for the controls, fiddled with a couple then stood away with a satisfied little smile.

Around the room, the various members of the command crew took their places to listen: Harlock leaning against the wall, arms folded, ankles crossed. Kei next to him in a similar posture. Mimay sat on the table, her knees drawn up to her chin, the folds of her diaphanous veils floating over the edge, where Luna's cat's kitten played with them, batting the gauzy scraps around with abandon. Ali sat in one of the chairs, his booted feet up on the table. Doc reached for a top-up and both Yattaran and Maji found chairs and sat with elbows resting on the table top.

All of them listened in silence, as the long-dead captain of the _Mahoroba_ detailed her fate.

After the sound of that final blaster shot echoed and faded into static and white noise, Maji reached over to switch off the audio.

For the longest time, no-one spoke. Mimay reached for Luna's bottle and took a long swallow directly from the neck.

'Make mine a double…' Ali muttered.

'So many lies…' Kei whispered. 'Did any of them suspect?'

Tochiro's voice came over the speaker. 'People want to believe what they're told, for the most part. Well, unless you're talking about perennial trouble-makers like me and Harlock. Or you lot.' He sighed. 'Plausible stories help as well - building a way station between galaxies… with an escort in case of remaining rebel factions… Didn't take much I imagine to round up the remaining survivors from the war, spread them between a handful of ships, then send them off on one last mission.'

'The captain knew…' Harlock said quietly. 'You could hear it in his voice. He knew, and so did his command staff - you couldn't pull this off unless someone fed it to the rest. That's why they died the way they did, in the end. It wasn't just the horrors of being trapped here… feeding off each other… someone had to be the Judas Goat, after all.' He bowed his head. 'The civilian contractors had no idea.'

'How did they find this place?' Kei asked. 'How did they know where to send them where they'd never be found - I'm assuming that was the plan?'

'There were always known anomalies,' Mimay whispered. 'That was, after all, what the dimensional oscillators were for, originally - to remove and contain such hazards.'

'The rift probably isn't stable.' They all turned to look at Yattaran. 'We need to get out of here. There's a drain on our power - thankfully since we have a Dark Matter engine, we can counteract the effects - the rest of these ships - they never had a chance…'

'About those…' Ali said quietly. 'Some of these pre-date the _Mahoroba_ , if that log's correct - they said there were vessels here when they arrived. And from the way these ships have been cut apart and recycled over the years, I'm guessing later arrivals tried to survive by taking stores from others…?'

Maji shook his head. 'Sorry - that doesn't actually work. More than a few weeks here and the power sources would be depleted. The Mahoroba and her sister ships had very few stores because someone never intended for them to be able to escape.' He shared a worried look with Yattaran. 'They only had enough engine power to get them this far - the conversion plants were sabotaged, probably en-route so that no-one suspected. We're able to function because our drive is self-sustaining, so long as the rift's open and we can draw on the raw dark matter. Plus our tech is derived from a science that understood places like this… The ships here.. they were blind and crippled the moment they arrived.'

'The orders and the secrecy and treachery must have driven the captain mad,' Harlock said softly. 'How any captain can lie to his crew like that and lead them to their deaths…'

Ali looked at Maji. Who looked at Yattaran. Who looked at Kei. Who folded her arms and gave Mimay a hard stare.

The alien woman simply allowed her long pale hair to fall over her face, and took another swig from Doc's bottle.

'So who launched the beacon?' Doc asked. 'If these guys didn't want to be found?'

'Launched from engineering,' Maji told them. 'Looks like the rest of the crew didn't get the _Dulce Et Decorum_ memo, and didn't realise it was already compromised…'

'Moving on…' Harlock added swiftly. 'If none of the ships brought here had the power to strip the other wrecks…'

'Wreckers…' Yattaran supplied. He pulled off his glasses, wiped them on his sweater, and shoved them back onto his face, not noticeably cleaner. 'Probably some group pops back every few years to check up and recover anything useable. A lot of the cuts on the newer ships look recent. Probably lie in wait waiting for someone to follow the breadcrumbs then arrive whilst they're still reeling. Quick shot to the engines and you can just wait it out then move in for the kill - strip what you can move quickly or use, just keep popping back as and when you feel like it.'

'And since those in the market can find plenty of pickings on the harvested colonies, no-one pays for people; it's not worth the effort of trafficking the crews - they probably leave them behind, to turn on each other, time after time.' Harlock unfolded his arms, uncrossed his ankles, and pushed himself off the wall. 'I'd like to…'

The ship shook from stem to stern as though a horse-fly had landed on its skin and it had twitched like a bitten horse.

'That didn't feel good…' Kei made a bee-line for the console and patched through the main systems for a read-out. 'Is this unstable rift closing in on us?' she asked.

'Not exactly,' Tochiro's voice sounded decidedly put out. 'Someone's started shooting at us!'

The doors had already opened, and there was a pile up as Captain, First Mate, XO and alien engineer all tried to get through the same gap. 'Ladies first,' Harlock quipped, yanking Yattaran back by means of hauling on his new belt, and allowing Kei and Mimay to get through - Kei at a run, Mimay at her usual, unhurried swaying walk. 'Ali - sound General Quarters from here then meet us on the bridge. All hands to battle stations!' He took off after Kei at a dead run, Yattaran waddling in his wake.


	5. Safe upon the shore

Harlock arrived on the bridge a couple of minutes after Kei, who was now shouting orders from her station, the crew jumping to obey. He bit back a grin at the sight, and dropped into the captain's chair.

'Are you plannin' on sitting down on the job?' Yattaran asked as he finished lumbering up the stairs and took a breather at the top, his hands on his knees and his head almost between them as he wheezed.

'All this running about… it's exhausting. Took me years to figure out why the Other Captain didn't bother breaking a sweat…' Harlock deadpanned.

'Just get your lazy ass over to the wheel,' Kei called out. 'Or where you planning on just watching from the stands?'

'These guys are hardly worth the effort, Kei. According to Tochiro their guns can't even scratch us. Even if they hit - that first shot was a lucky blow at close range - the moment we moved, they couldn't hit the broadside of a barn if they stood inside it. My friend tells me they can't get a lock-on due to the weird sensor readings this place gives…'

'Eh. He has a point.' Yattaran eyed up his own console with a suspicious glare. 'This space pocket doesn't respond in the same way as normal space-time to the mass of a ship this big - the normal gravitational wiggle you'd see ain't in the right place… it's throwing a kind of doppelganger effect... '

'Loosely translated for the rest of us?' Ali shouted out from the lower deck.

'We can't hit shit either, coz the effect is a quantum entanglement that makes the sensors think the ship is anything up to five hundred kilometers away from where it really is…'

'Call that a translation?' Ali grumbled. 'What about eyeballing the target?'

'Against _what_ as a reference point, dickhead?' Yattaran shouted down. 'If you think you can line up a shot manually in fucking _space_ , be my guest.' He flinched slightly as another beam flickered past the main viewer. 'Did you just have a brain fart?'

'We've got a whole bloody _ocean_ of reference points, fatso - how about getting me some triangulated markers off that debris field for comparisons and let me sort out the targeting?'

'Less mouth, more action, people,' Kei called out. 'Yattaran - Tochiro was working on the sensors, see if any of it has made a difference. Ali - can you draw a bead on these guys if we _can_ get you a solid reference?'

'If doughboy there puts his brain where his mouth is, I can hit something for you. Lure 'em into a line of sight with the debris field, I can take it from there!'

'Just do it,' Harlock said gently, not bothering to stand up. 'They're in the mouth of the rift. Kei - I want them out of our way so chase them to where we want them. Ali, Yattaran - get a lock on any way you can. Maji - do you have an ID on that ship yet?'

'Working on it - doesn't match anything in the databanks.'

'It's a chimera,' Tochiro replied over the speakers. 'Looks like it's been stitched together from the parts of at least a dozen ships - including a large cargo carrier. I think we've found our wreckers…'

'Well their eyes are bigger than their stomach this time,' Yattaran muttered smugly. 'Do they really think they can take on something in our weight class?'

'They're probably desperate enough to give it a try,' Harlock replied. 'But I want these bastards out of my space. Filthy trade.'

Ali's gun crews fired off a salvo that barely missed the engines of the other ship, forcing her to turn and run for the relative safety of the debris field. 'Gotcha! Idiot… Does nobody out here know how to make use of their terrain?' He raised his head to shout up to the main bridge: 'Where are my reference points, Yattaran?!'

'I'm calibrating this as fast as I can, keep your boxers on, Professor!'

'Ain't wearing any, lardball. Little Ali likes the airflow…'

'Oh for fu… guys - I do _not_ need to hear this!' Kei shouted back down. She shot a glance back over her shoulder to the captain's chair and its relaxed occupant. 'Feel free to join in… _Captain…_ if it's not too much effort?'

'When you're all doing so nicely without me? These guys are amateurs, wake me when something actually dangerous happens,' he shot back with a shit eating grin he knew damn well would wind her up.

Sure enough, she gave him a frown he knew promised later retribution, and turned back to her station, muttering something under her breath which made even Yattaran do a double take.

 _You could just tell them we have this in hand…_ Tochiro's voice in his head held a chiding tone.

'And miss this? Let them get these assholes where it hurts. They have it coming. Are you sure about the oscillator cannon?' he replied under his breath.

 _Same basic principle as the dimensional oscillators. Just smaller yield. Once we're clear of the rift, tell Ali to aim and fire all twelve banks at the rift. That should be enough to close it..._

'Sending triangulation data through, Mr Smarty-no-pants,' Yattaran called out. 'Better hope you're as good as you've always claimed you were, Ali.'

'Got it. Right… Levary, Sabu, Carlos, Dan… I want you guys on the arrays. Drop the computer readout, go to manual targeting. Compensating for drift… up three point oh six degrees, Muttonchops! Steady on the helm… Hey - is _anyone_ on the bloody helm?'

'I'll take it.' Harlock finally stood up and strode towards the ship's wheel. 'Tochiro's busy on something else.' He took up his stance behind the wheel, his hands firm on the wooden balusters. 'Steady as she goes, Maji, Mimay. Ali - whenever you're ready…'

'Locking on… target acquired. Fire!'

Multiple beams from the ship's main cannon lanced out from the Arcadia, and sped towards her target.

'Holding steady… time on target 5-4-3…' Kei began. 'Near miss! Target coming about, plasma bolts launched!'

'They're already warping away from us, don't panic,' Harlock said quietly. 'Seems they've got targeting difficulties as well. Ali - where's my big boom?'

'Second volley - fire!'

The handful of seconds it took for the bolts to reach their target always seemed to stretch out. Then a cheer went up from the lower bridge, as their attacker exploded, shrapnel launched from her carcass. She lay listing in front of them, her entire centre section missing, faint wisps of oxygen trailing to create a frozen halo around the dead ship.

'Let's get out of here.' Spinning the wheel, Harlock took his ship on a heading that would take them back through the rift into normal space.

'Is that looking narrower?' Yattaran asked as they approached.

 _Erm… he's right. It's started to fluctuate…_

'Not narrower - just unstable,' Harlock replied. 'Finding a gap wide enough to get through safely might be a problem… Mimay - I need a shield, now!'

The dark billowing cloud of dark matter around the Arcadia - until now largely confined to wispy contrails around her wings and extremities- began to envelop the ship, expanding outwards at a phenomenal rate until from the bridge, the exterior was cloaked in an impenetrable darkness lit by red lightning.

Guided by the voice of Arcadia's heart, Harlock aimed the ship at the rift, spinning her round on her vertical axis, to punch through the pulsating rift, and back into normal space. Without sparing a moment, he brought the ship straight back round until her skull fronted bow was pointing at the rift.

'Ali - you have a lock on that rift? Tochiro should be sending it through…'

'Yeah - target acquired. Captain…?'

'Fire all cannon on his mark. One continuous burst, all batteries!'

Once again the Arcadia's guns spoke.

The universe answered. Seconds after the terrifying beams lanced out from the ship, a massive shockwave hit, rocking her violently. Even Harlock had to take hold of the wheel to stay upright with one hand - the other gently fielded Kei, who went flying, almost taking him down with her. As it was he ended up pinned to the wheel with her bottom firmly pressed against his crotch.

'Well at least it was you, and not Yattaran,' he whispered in her ear as he helped push her back to her feet.

'And once again, I need brain bleach,' she muttered back with a grin. 'Everyone okay?' she called out. A chorus of "ayes" followed. Yattaran picked himself up off the floor, glaring at his captain and rubbing a shoulder.

'A little warning next time?' Ali called out from below. 'I landed on my ass again… seriously - I might have broken something…' he added plaintively.

'Get Doc to rub it better,' Harlock called down. His bird flew down from the vaulted ceiling and made a heavier-than-necessary landing on his right shoulder, adding an ear splitting squawk into his ear just to ram the point home as a couple of feathers floated down and brushed the metal floor. 'Tochiro?' he asked as he flinched away from the aggrieved shriek.

 _Eh. I think that should do it… at any rate, I can't locate any of those odd readings through the noise we just made…_

'Mimay?' Kei ran to the rear of the bridge to where the pale beauty leaned wearily over the glowing globe used to control the massive, organ-like dark matter engine towering over them, a circular arch revolving constantly in front of the soaring pipes.

'I'm fine,' the Nibelung whispered. She allowed Kei to help her, and gave the young woman an acknowledging nod. 'The silence… is gone. Even behind the discordance of the Arcadia's cannon, all I hear now is music. Free, unrestrained… the melody restored.'

'I'm hoping you understood that,' Harlock muttered as an aside to Kei as he sat back down, having relinquished the helm to Yattaran. 'Set a course for Miraiseria - after setting a warning buoy. Rokuro's is the closest stationed ship we know - we'll give him the coordinates and his people can finish up here.'

Kei gave him a sharp look, at the tone in his voice: weary, frustrated… and a look on his face and in his single visible hazel eye that she knew all too well. A brief glimpse of the man he had been, years ago, when he'd first come aboard. The reluctant assassin.

She made her way to his side and laid a gloved hand on his shoulder. 'Hey. We did some good today. I might even let you off the bone-dense stupidity of running headfirst into trouble and giving our youngest crewmember flashbacks to his own personal horrors…' she said softly, but with enough steel to let him know he wasn't totally off the hook.

His answering smile was all too brief and grim. 'I sometimes think the hardest battle we ever fight is with ourselves… days like this, you start to wonder if you can ever make a difference, given the inertia in human behaviour. That captain… He thought he was willing to lay down his own life to encompass the deaths of over two thousand people, and for what? To cover up a secret? For a government that has only ever cared about its own power and nothing for the people it's supposed to serve…'

'...and in the end he realised he was duped just as badly as the rest of his men,' she said quietly. 'Until he only saw one way out of the horror he'd created?' She slipped gracefully onto his knee and laid her cheek against his, heedless of the bemused look it earned her from Yattaran before the big man looked away quickly, flushing.

'What use freedom if the understanding needed to free you from the shackles of your own folly comes too late?' he asked her, placing an arm around her waist. 'Days like this I get a sharp lesson not only in how lucky I was, but also in how fine a line we sometimes tread.' He gave her a peck on the cheek. 'I hear Ali clunking up the stairs, we'd better get to our posts before he starts in about us getting a room…' He placed his hand on her bottom to give her a push, just as Ali's head popped over the top of the stairs.

'See - I told ya,' he said to the tousle-haired boy next to him, as Tadashi popped up beside him. ' _Grabby…'_

Harlock rolled his visible eye at Kei, who bit back a smile as they strolled arm in arm to their respective stations. As he took the wheel, Kei leaned in close to whisper: 'What the hell is he talking about?'

'Grand Technologia…' he whispered back.

'Seriously - is he _still_ not over that?' Her reply was a stage whisper designed to carry, and she smiled fondly as she saw the tips of the burly pirate's ears redden to a shade that almost matched his new sweater. 'Would anyone notice if we left someone behind…?

'Notice? - probably - the question is - would anyone _care…'_ Harlock deadpanned.

At Ali's indignant "oi!" he shook his head. _Lucky… yeah. Some days more than others_. He raised his head and took a firm grip of the balusters, feeling the ship respond to his touch, her background hum intensifying. A backwards glance over his left shoulder to catch Mimay's eye, and he felt the ship begin to bunch its metaphorical muscles under his feet, the air suddenly charged with pale blue lightning, jumping from person to person like a brief flicker of St Elmo's Fire.

He stared straight ahead, braced for the jump. 'Arcadia - let's go!'

In the dark of space, a wispy trail of deeper darkness was all that remained as the great battleship leapt into sub space. And within seconds, even that was dispersed on a gust of an unseen cosmic wind.


End file.
